Hello everyone! This is Ann Zieve with the Northern Utah Home Team and Keller Williams Success Realty here to give you my weekly market update, and this week I have some great tips for you about Internet searching for homes, but first let’s look at some market statistics, and then we’ll look at some new homes on the market, so let’s get going. So here’s our chart of weekly market statistics that we keep for you and right now we’re at the beginning to middle of August, and what I like to do is compare it to where we were about a year ago back in October, so about 10 months ago. You can see how the number of new listings has increased. Those sellers have a lot of confidence in this market so new homes are jumping on the market. Buyers are still buying. They still have confidence in the market, and so the price has been creeping up. Also, the number of days on market is down. It’s a little bit more competitive out there. So let’s take a look at some Internet searching techniques because that’s how a lot of people find out about the market.
So here I am on Zillow. I am sure a lot of you are familiar with Zillow. It’s the number one real estate search engine, but I bet you didn’t know this. If you go down to the bottom of Zillow and check on, click on Zestimates, it takes you to this nice, little chart and tells you about how accurate the Zillow estimates are, and you can see for Utah you only get a one star, and if you look down here to what one star means, it means that it’s based on tax assessors value or they are unable to compute the accuracy of their data. That’s because Utah is a non-disclosure state. Sellers are not required to report to any public agency what they sold a house for, so Zillow has no clue, so when you’re searching for values on Zillow just be aware that they are really guesstimates, not any kind of real life estimates. Let me show you an example.
Now, what is the real value of a home? The real value of a home is when a buyer and a seller agrees it is. So here’s a home that we recently sold that I put into Zillow and it estimates the value to be $332,000. I can tell you the home did not sell for that much, so that is not really the value of that home. Well, let’s look at one more. Here’s another home that we sold recently that the Zestimate is $144,000 and I can tell you that home sold for more, so again, Zillow is not right on the mark there, so the best way to find out the value of a home whether you are looking to buy or sell is to talk to a realtor. We have access to the MLS data which is accurate because sellers do agree to report sold prices there. We can give you a great value on a home you want to sell or that you want to buy.
Well let’s look at some homes that are for sale right now. This first home is listed for $150,000. It’s located in the popular Meadowbrook neighborhood which is north of 12th Street in Ogden. It’s four bedrooms, two baths, and the neighborhood has four parks, so there is no houses behind this home because it’s one of the parks that’s behind it. You can sit on your deck and enjoy the great view. You can see the home has been recently redone, new paint, new carpet, and it’s in great condition. Here’s another new home that’s available. This is actually a townhome listed for $205,000. It’s three bedrooms and three baths. It also has a two-car garage. It’s about $1,500 square feet, and it’s located right by the Ogden Canyon on the Ogden side, so it makes a great second home or a ski rental place for people who want to come out and ski and maybe just be here part-time, so that’s available.
So that wraps up this week’s market update. Remember that we are here to help you if you’re looking to buy a home, sell a home, or invest in real estate. We’re just a phone call, text, or email away, and we’re here to give you values on any homes you’re looking to buy or sell. So until next week, keep buying and selling that real estate. Bye, bye!